The headsets for Facebook's Oculus Rift reportedly stopped working on March 7 following a lapsed security certificate that expired on the same day. Oculus issued an emergency patch to remedy the situation while Facebook's Vice President for Virtual Reality (VR) Hugo Barra announced on Twitter that they will be offering an automatic $15 store credit for those who have been affected by the outage.
Eurogamer reported that Oculus Rift users were surprised to find out that their headsets were returning error messages like "Can't Reach Oculus Runtime Service" or "Failed to initialize with Oculus: Signature Invalid." When the VR community searched for the possible reason for the outage, they found a file named OculusAppFramework.dll which apparently contains an expired security certificate.
According to TechCrunch, personal computers (PCs) require software pieces to have certificates that need to be updated every couple or so years to function that will verify their authenticity. Oculus has failed to give the necessary update to users. Moreover, the expired certificate means Oculus will not be able to publish an automatic update to fix the outage — they have to build a separate patch for users to download separately.
Oculus has done exactly that to fix the headset outage issue. Polygon reported that Oculus issued an emergency patch for users to install. By means of an apology, Barra said in a Tweet that Oculus will be providing an automatic $15 store credit which will be added within the next seven days starting March 9 for those who have been affected by the outage, provided they have used Rift on or after Feb. 1, 2018.
